Imagine you’re in an important meeting. It’s online and you’re at home, so you’re nervously looking at the people you want to impress through a screen. Suddenly, the sound goes and then the picture freezes. Panic sets in, and you immediately start thinking about what these people are going to think about you. You can’t believe how unlucky you are.

Let’s use this situation to explore our bandwidth, in both the technical and personal definitions.

Although technical blips like this can happen to anyone, and usually do. This one was different. When you joined the meeting, in a rush, you were downloading updates in the background. You were also downloading some large games on your console in another room and you just decided to turn down the music that was streaming instead of stopping it.

Unfortunately, you haven’t considered your bandwidth. In terms of technology, it’s how much data or speed we have available to us and it’s often used when we talk about our home broadband and wifi. That’s what happened here, your system became overloaded.

The situation is unlikely to fix itself. You’ll have to make changes and stop something, or it will keep happening. It’s also easy to blame the equipment, or put it down to bad luck. A simple awareness and some planning could have made a difference though. By doing less, you would have felt better and would have been able to do more.

So what about that personal definition I mentioned? When it comes to us, it relates to how much energy and mental capacity we have available to get things done. Like our technology, We all have a finite amount of energy, that we need to draw on when we want to do things.

Like the example we’ve just explored, we can spread ourselves too thin trying to do too much at the same time. We can also fail to take time to recharge and refresh. Again, like the example we can pay a price if we don’t do this. We often blame other things or people as well.

If you want to avoid something like this, just do these three easy things:

Work out what’s on your plate, what’s important right now

Ask yourself what’s essential, what do you need to focus on

Have a think about what you can say no to

All of this will help you preserve that all important bandwidth and boost your energy and attention. We don’t want to burn out.